Anyone who has escaped the clutches of catastrophe knows that he basically had the help of simple people to thank, people who were not overcome by the hate, the terror, the mechanicalness of platitudes. These people withstood the propaganda and its plainly demonic insinuations. When such virtues also manifest in a leader of people, endless blessings can result… The ruler reigns not by taking but by giving life.
-Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage
Each one of us, as human persons, has a deep and lasting desire for virtue. Though this desire to conform one’s life to the good might be distorted by ignorance or completely perverted by vice, it cannot be erased from the human heart. It is this insight into the life of the human person that is the foundation of our Civilization, the guiding principle of the West. And because it is forgotten again and again, pushed aside by the cares and concerns that poison our world, Divine Providence raises heroic witnesses before the community of Mankind, to remind us what each and every one of us are capable of doing. For our own age, we have been gifted with the life of an amazing hero, Karl of Austria, to embody for us the call to virtue.
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The Crusades are often looked upon now days as an unjust aggression against a peaceful and superior culture. Yet that culture had invaded the Catholic Roman Empire, and had threatened to utterly destroy it. Good Catholic men (each with his wife’s permission, of course) would go forth to fight and more importantly to defend the remnants of true Civilization left to them (see my previous post on 
The War for Christendom 